I've been playing a little of the new version, and so far as usual it a bit of a mixed bag, but there's a lot I'm loving.

Pros:
- Vampires! They can be pretty annoying at times, since they drain about 3 dwarves a year for blood and generally drain them completely, but there are ways to deal with them. They are actually rather good at blending into your fort, even going so far as to make false accusations to throw others off their trail. They tend to only attack dwarves who are sleeping though, so a good tactic to catch them in the act is to make sure one of your squads is always patrolling your residential district. If they see a dwarf being attacked by a vampire it will create a justice event and allow you to imprison the vampire.

There are also ways to get your entire fort infected with vampirism if you feel like having an army of super-powered dwarves (vampires don't eat, drink, feel pain, get drowsy, sick, and have double the strength, speed, and toughness of a normal dwarf).

- Necromancers! Not only can vampires infiltrate you, but necromancers can too and they will generally make a pain of themselves by quietly animating the dead around your fort.

- Bug fixes! Lots of them in there notably:
Hospitals seem to be much better now. The whole healing process is still a tad slow, but I had dwarves go in and get every manner of treatment successfully. I even had a militia captain whose back had been broken by a goblin in battle get surgery that repaired the nerve damage to his spine allowing him to (kind of) walk again.

Training works better now. When properly setup squads will have classes and increase their skills quickly.

- Faster! Lots of speed optimizations to the game. I have over 100 dwarves running around now and FPS is still pegged at the top.

Cons:
Still plenty of bugs to go around including a crash bug I had last night after I killed a forgotten beast. I killed it, but when I went to mouse over the square it was in the game crashed. Also soap making still seems to be buggy... I have everything I need, but it's still not letting me for some reason.

Some people aren't really fans of vampires or necromancers. In a large fort they can still be hard to track down, and they can often kill very important and experienced dwarves.

Played some more of this over the weekend, and my new fort is up to about 150 dwarves and has fended off a couple of goblin sieges now.

At one point I had 3 vampires in my fort as well, although one of them finally died after getting sentenced to 10 hits from the hammerer for draining a fellow soldier dry. So far the give away for vampires are that they are the only units I've seen to have both weapon and marksman training when they arrive, and they almost always have a long list of previous allegiances due to their long lives.

So far they seem like more of a minor annoyance than anything else. They will kill a random dwarf every so often which means sometimes it's not a big deal, or other times you lose someone good. I think I've lost 3 dwarves to vampires so far, but only one of them was very skilled (legendary miner).

I'm really loving hospitals now though. All the kinks seem to have been largely worked out and I've only lost a couple of dwarves to combat, and those were instant deaths due to head hits, etc. Any dwarf that gets put down in the hospital tends to survive now. Heck, my captain of the guards was given the position after holding off a goblin ambush single handedly until reinforcements could arrive to help. He lost his foot to a goblin axe during the battle, but our doctors were able to stabilize him and now he trucks around with his crutch and seems to handle everything as good as someone with 2 feet.

New update out v34.10, and it includes minecarts, which were immediately weaponized into a Dwarven Railgun.
Mike Mayday graphics (dfg 34_10) and Dwarf Therapist(0.6.12) are working with the new update.
I have started, but still in the first year and have not built a minecart yet.
Has anybody else experienced the new toys yet?

It is weird how far Tarn has come. I still remember chatting with him at Tom Proudfoot's original forums back in 1998 or so, when he mentioned he was working on a then ascii, somewhat isometric(well, not really isometric but the 'tiles' were a kind of diamond shape like Civilization used to be) roguelike called "Slaves to Armok". If you think Dwarf Fortress is hard to look at you should have seen the original screenshots of that game! Of course that evolved into the 3D game, which itself evolved into DF.
Me and Tarn would have discussions about G.G. Allin(he had gotten the notorious "Hated in the Nation" as a Christmas or Birthday gift IIRC). For those who do not know G.G. was the last word in controversy and sickness when it came to music(he died of a heroin overdose back in 1994 or '95 or so) and it is rare to find someone outside of the "crustcore" punks who even knows who G.G. was.

And Tarn is now being featured in lengthy NY Times articles. Nice.

"I am in a very peculiar business...I travel all over the world telling people what they should already know." - James "The Amazing" Randi

I usually just curse when things go bad and then say "Yea, but teh graphics suck."

The opinions expressed by JonathanStrange are solely those of JonathanStrange and do not reflect the opinions of OctopusOverlords.com, the forum members of OctopusOverlords, the elusive Mr. Norrell, or JonathanStrange.

World activation! There are a few things that aren't active, like megabeast invasions, but lots of world gen actions made it into the game. Birth, death (to the extent it wasn't handled before), marriages, site foundation as well as reclaims, basic succession and appointments/etc., invasions, as well as some more detail beyond world gen, like patrols, banditry and animal population handling. We still don't have army battles -- the invasions are all successful right now, unless they are locally interfered with by you.

The game advances two weeks before each play -- the calendar there still moves slowly when there's a lot of action, as there is in larger worlds, but there are quite a few things I can do soon to speed that up. Due to the speed of the calendar, new forts in particular also get just two weeks. This'll probably cause some shenanigans with the caravan (or you'll just have to wait a year in an autumn fort for your first one) until we sort it out.

Fortresses can be retired and unretired. Losing is still fun but if it doesn't happen when you want, you can put it off for a while. Retired forts can be conquered (much more easily than they would be if you still controlled them), so don't be surprised if you have to reclaim instead of being able to unretire sometimes. You can reclaim forts that didn't make it through world generation.

Site maps for dwarves, elves and goblins. These are very basic, but they are there, anyway.

Multi-tile trees and lots of new plants. Fruit and flowers. Leaves that fall in little clouds. I had to put off dwarf mode tree harvesting, but we should get to that before long.

Megabeasts/forgotten beasts can attack, destroy and then reside within world gen sites like dwarf fortresses.

Various movement changes. Climbing/jumping/sprinting in both modes, though invaders still require a line of site to use them. Adventure mode has a stealth rewrite, and some elements of that are present in dwarf mode (it is generally easier to spot thieves and ambushers, and I'll probably need to make them smarter about finding cover). Movement and combat are separate now. Startled people climb up the walls of their homes a little too often.

Tracking information in adventure mode. You can pull up a little window and see tracks (capital K), and you can also have it describe the freshest track that isn't yours to more easily stay on a trail (alt K). Tracks are also part of the regular look command.

Different levels of conflict -- your opponents in adventure mode will be listed with the current status (non-lethal, lethal, no quarter, etc.).

Combat moves take place over a period of time now, and you can do things like catching an opponent's attack -- you have to do that by targeting a grab at the offending part now (reactions used to have a menu, but that was before combat got more smeared out). You can get information about what attacks your opponent is doing in the attack menu -- the quality of the information depends on your situational awareness skill. You can add adjective modifiers to your attacks (quick/heavy/etc.) and you can perform more than one attack at a time for a significant penalty to its force. It might make sense with two adamantine swords or something, twirling them about.

Rumors of incidents can be spread, and the rumors need to be spread before you gain reputation (good or bad). Killing all of the witnesses to an event will effectively remove it from play if you don't let them get off the screen. People are a little psychic as it regards ongoing conflicts, so that they can make decisions non-stupidly. Your liaison can share rumors with your fort, but I still need to set up the screen for reviewing them after you've seen them the first time... not that you can do much with the information.

You can travel through tunnels.

You can get a guide to travel with you to a faraway place -- it still ended up being too cumbersome, so locals continue to be able to tell you the location of sites, but only within a certain distance of their home town.

In general, conversations have been redone. They no longer have their own screen, but run along with other actions, and there are many more options.

The mind has been rewritten quite a bit -- people now experience emotions according to different circumstances (lots of awkward monologues there), and they consider actions differently. The main outstanding issue is that I didn't get around to converting existing dwarf mode thoughts, so they sort of exist concurrently with the new emotions and that needs to be changed. I'll get to that before job priorities (which was one of the main shorter-term reasons for the rewrite). Some dwarves have life-long dreams and it is possible for them to recognize that they've accomplished the ones relating to skills and family. They cannot yet realize their dreams of taking over the world.

The paragraph at the beginning of adventure mode was marginally more useful, but that slipped a bit at the end as things were tweaked. I think it'll still describe certain invasions and abductions, but it needs to be redone.

Lots of new arena options -- not just the conflict state, but you can set the temperature etc. to all sorts of extremes.

Some experiments with procedural items, though the new demon-type sites are still quite un-fun now. The knowledge on the slab at the bottom can be used, but it is probably not worth the trouble.
The stuff I forgot

Bug fixes
I'm sure several old bugs were "fixed" as large portions of the code was rewritten/removed, but I haven't tried to track exactly which ones. Bug fixes will commence in earnest now, and everything will be handled over at the bug tracker.

I was just starting to think about Dwarf Fortress again, and here it is.

Just be wary, the Lazy Newb Pack/Starter Pack is still not fully compatible with the new version. I'm sticking with the old version until some of the kinks are worked out and until Dwarf Therapist works properly!

Besides, the new version patch notes looks like there was a lot of unintentional FUN that slipped through.

The new version is pretty unstable. I've started three different fortresses since release, and two have ended with crashes that rendered the save unusable. I gave up on my third fort when my dwarves started mysteriously disappearing. (This was not a bug--I would get a "Urist McDwarf has been missing for a week" report, and said dwarf would be on the dead list with no report of an attack. This probably means that one of my starting dwarfs was a vampire.)

I started one fortress in a forest area, and even in ASCII it was all strangely beautiful. In the past, trees were single-space objects one level high. In the new version, trees occupy three or four vertical levels: at the ground level, there's a single-space round trunk, but when you go up you see several spaces worth of branches and leaves spreading out, and above that there's a canopy of green leaves that will blossom white later in the spring and turn red in the fall before shedding bare for winter. Fallen fruit (inedible to dwarfs, it seems) litters the ground at appropriate times.

Apparently there's a bug where fast-flying creatures can't steer around the new trees. They frequently collide with them and burst their organs, falling to the ground with the fruit.

I played DF for a while and really liked it. Though I would like it a lot more if the grahics had the same level.

I know this has been said many times before and making a game likes this + the graphics would be probably be absurdly huge and demanding on any system (and developer)...
but still, that would be amazing ^^.

I guess that's why I've been trying other games like

Towns: Really liked it until I encountered the game breaking bugs that will never be fixed
Gnomoria: Really need to get into it a bit more
Craft The World: Haven't tried it yet since it's still early acces

and I've also backed these on kickstarter:

Planets
Stonehearth

Ah well, a man can dream that one day a game will be able to combine both perfectly.

It would be awesome if I could play DF on my iPad though ^^. Even though the iPad would instantly explode

EzeKieL wrote:Ah well, a man can dream that one day a game will be able to combine both perfectly.

The good news: That isn't a mockup, that's actually Stonesense graphics in Dwarf Fortress proper (the weird text in the main view is someone not configuring it right).
The bad news: It only works on the old version. It will probably take months to get working in the new version.

EzeKieL wrote:Ah well, a man can dream that one day a game will be able to combine both perfectly.

The good news: That isn't a mockup, that's actually Stonesense graphics in Dwarf Fortress proper (the weird text in the main view is someone not configuring it right).
The bad news: It only works on the old version. It will probably take months to get working in the new version.

Yeah, I heard about stonesense, but last time I checked it just showed you a status of your fortress. You didn't seem to be able to play it real time, or maybe I just did it wrong?

Dwarf Therapist should work with it, but again, only for the old 34.xx version, not 40.02. Exactly zero tools or mods except some tilesets and very basic raw file manipulation (removing aquifers, etc) work in the new version.

Zurai wrote:Like I said, that's Stonesense being used as the graphics engine for DF. As in it's displayed in the DF window in real-time.

It's a very recent development, part of the DFHack toolset, which again only works for the old version.

Does that mean no Dwarf Therapist? Once you play with Dwarf Therapist, you can never go back, even more than you can never go back after you've played with decent tile set.

Give them a few weeks, they tend to update pretty well. The LNP is what you want to watch, as the guy who puts that together tends to be pretty on the ball.

I started a new fort with the old version and it took me FOREVER to find an embark with iron (or even bronze). I did manage to get a volcano, which is super sweet, and some hematite a bit deeper than I would like. Where are the old maps with huge hematite veins everywhere? I did use reveal and now it is stuck on. I'm not sure I dislike this, as hunting for metal always messed up my perfect fortress plan.

I don't recommend it to anyone else, but I've been playing DF with the default graphics from the beginning. I've never used Therapist or other tools. Somehow I just stuck with it until the awkward, clunky interface clicked for me, and now I can just sort of see through it.

"To wield Grond, the mighty hammer of the Federal Government, is to be intoxicated with power beyond what you and I can reckon (though I figure we can ball park it pretty good with computers and maths). Need to tunnel through a mountain? Grond. Kill a mighty ogre? Grond. Hangnail? Grond. Spider? Grond (actually, that's a legit use, moreso than the rest)." - Peacedog

Holman wrote:I don't recommend it to anyone else, but I've been playing DF with the default graphics from the beginning. I've never used Therapist or other tools. Somehow I just stuck with it until the awkward, clunky interface clicked for me, and now I can just sort of see through it.

Your name is Neo isn't it, and you can read the Matrix?!

I used to disdain graphics packs, but got hooked on Mayday after a few months of playing. I never used the tools until late in the game, when my time available to play dwindled to a much lower level.

I've heard of a new mod coming out though. It is a mix between Dwarf Therapist and Dwarf Analyst. I think they are calling it Dwarf Analrapist...

Holman wrote:I don't recommend it to anyone else, but I've been playing DF with the default graphics from the beginning. I've never used Therapist or other tools. Somehow I just stuck with it until the awkward, clunky interface clicked for me, and now I can just sort of see through it.

Your name is Neo isn't it, and you can read the Matrix?!

I used to disdain graphics packs, but got hooked on Mayday after a few months of playing. I never used the tools until late in the game, when my time available to play dwindled to a much lower level.

I've heard of a new mod coming out though. It is a mix between Dwarf Therapist and Dwarf Analyst. I think they are calling it Dwarf Analrapist...

My fortress was menaced by an Ettin, not any run-of-the-mill creature but a lower sort of megabeast. It came into my zone and seemed intent on staying. Fortunately I had already built sturdy walls and drawbridges at my entrance, so I could turtle up and taunt the creature from inside.

After two seasons, an Elf caravan arrived to trade. Any doubts about the Ettin's capacity for violence were satisfied by the short work it made of the guards, merchants, and horses. It killed them all in moments, suffering only a bruised shin in the process. Shortly thereafter, I received a message: "The Ettin So-and-So has transformed into a Weremammoth!" Later it transformed back, healing its shin completely.

Another season passed, and then the migrants arrived. By my count there were more than 20. The Ettin waded into them and slaughtered about a dozen, but its leg was fractured in the process, and it was listed on the status screen as suffering "Extreme Pain." It moved very slowly, allowing the surviving (and panicked, wounded, and nauseous) migrants to run for my drawbridge.

I decided that this was the time to take down the beast; if he transformed again, he would return completely healed, so it was now or never. I opened the drawbridge and my soldiers--three squads of moderately well-trained fighters, though sadly under-equipped and unarmored--stormed out past the migrants rushing in. They surrounded the Ettin on every side. At first I couldn't make out the blinking action, although three of my soldiers were flung out of the melee and landed far away, bloody and unconscious. I figured this was probably the end of my fort.

Somehow, miraculously, the surviving soldiers took down the beast. As far as I can tell, they did it mostly by wrestling and punching. Good boys, those dwarfs. Someone is going to get a promotion. (Someone will have to--the militia commander and one of the captains are both dead.)

I saved the game at that point. I can't wait to see what effect the deaths of so many migrants will have on the mood of my civilians. We were already shaky from a Fishery Worker who took it upon himself to murder the mayor in his bedroom. I don't know what the backstory was there, but I'm sure there is one.

EDIT: Aftermath.

It was too much. The carnage among the migrants sent most of them into deep depression, and the sight of the bodies made my stalwart veterans unhappy as well. Attempting to clean up the mess of blood and bodies sent several dwarfs into "emotional shock," eventually leading to violent tantrums. At least one of these tantrums erupted in savage mutual violence in the crowded dining hall. Suddenly there were more bodies on the floor and blood on the tables. After that, things went downhill quickly. Even my soldiers joined the riot. My fort fell into a struggle of all against all. In just a few minutes of play, another dozen dwarfs were dead.

It was at that moment that ANOTHER megabeast arrived: a misshapen Were-elk with red eyes and sharp teeth, thirsting for blood. He made a beeline for the fort, and I decided not even to give the order to raise the drawbridge. It was simpler that way.

The Weremouse am Pannor Nebo Kedram has come! A large mouse twisted into humanoid form. It is crazed for blood and flesh. Its eyes glow red. Its black hair is patchy. Now you will know why you fear the night.

There's a new DF version out! This is 0.42.01, the first new release since January.

Change list:

Spoiler:

Here is the new version we've been working on all year! The flow of fortress life is quite a bit different now -- specific breaks and parties have been replaced by taverns and performances and needs and inebriation. You can designate a tavern, temple or library from a meeting area zone, bedroom or dining room using the new Assign Location option. The location list ('l') will let you know what sort of furniture and items you need, and you can set tavern keepers, scribes and other occupations there as well. You'll need to set up a drink stockpile and a chest for goblets in taverns for drink service to work properly, but dwarves can still drink without a tavern as before. You can assign multiple rooms/zones to a single location. There's a lot more -- see the feature list below.

The bug fix list below is partial. Large chunks of the game were changed, which has a way of making old bugs go away while bringing in new ones to take their place. We'll be focusing on bugs old and new in subsequent releases, starting with crashing saves and moving down the list. The next set of bug-fix releases will be measured on a scale of days and weeks rather than months, as usual.

New stuff

Ability to designate taverns, temples and libraries in the fortress
Taverns and libraries also exist in adventure mode and world generation
Tavern keepers can serve drinks in both modes, goblets can be used by dwarves to drink (in taverns or otherwise)
Performances include stories, poetry, music and dance (you can view activity descriptions from the unit/job list)
Art forms are randomly generated for each civilization
Instruments are now all generated, instruments can be used in both modes
Most instruments are constructed from multiple pieces using different materials
Personalities and values lead to needs which can be met by various actions in both modes
The fort has visitors, residency petitions and eventual citizenship, including non-dwarves
Tavern visitors include mercenaries, monster slayers, bandits, diplomats and performers
Can set details for clothing/armor jobs to make them for other races that can equip items
Monster slayers can petition your fortress to go down and fight monsters once you discover the underground
Performance troupes are active in world generation and into play, visiting the fort, can be formed in adventure mode
New knowledge system divided into nine branches (though it has very few practical effects so far)
Fortress scholars can advance knowledge, form master-apprentice relationships and write down their findings
Fortress scribes can copy works in your library
Scholars can visit your fortress libraries, bringing knowledge from around the world
Devoted historical figures can visit your fortress temples
Three forms of writing material: papyrus sheets, paper sheets and parchment sheets
Papyrus sheets are made directly from the plant at the farmer's workshop
Paper is made from pressed slurries (start at the quern/mill, then go to a screw press)
Parchment is made from hide and milk of lime at the tanner's (bake quicklime at a kiln, then make milk of lime at an ashery)
Sheets are used to make quires or with rollers to make scrolls -- these are then used for writing
Quires can be bound into codices with bindings after they contain writing
Dwarves read books in the library (they don't need to be scholars)
Values can be passed in writing (both modes) and through adventure mode arguments (uses some conversation skills)
Animal people are playable as adventurers, arrive as fort visitors and sometimes live in towns in (playable) populations
Children play with toys now, and they can also play make believe, in both modes
Personality can be customized/randomized in adventure mode, appearance can be randomized as well
Temples can be defiled in both modes, dwarf temples can be assigned to particular gods
Adventurer can rent rooms in inns
Adventurers can compose new poems, music and dances
Adventurers can write material down on empty quires or scrolls
Alcohol causes inebriation, erratic behavior, unconsciousness, death
Festivals occur in world generation, though we haven't gotten them out of there yet
Dwarves will wear trinkets again

Major bug fixes

Fixed some army pathing issues
Goblins have mounts again
Fixed long-standing flow bug with unit occupancy
Stopped some issues with brawls escalating to non-lethal

Other bug fixes/tweaks

Looking at reaction screen for redded-out reactions in workshop will indicate missing reagents now
Fixed inversion problem with half of the child/parent conversation thoughts
Lots of historical figures that weren't around from the beginning didn't have deities when they were supposed to
Allowed site finder to look for 1x1 sites
Human civilizations now have randomized values
Added ability to set invasion wave cap size

My son, who is a slave to whatever the latest video blogger is saying, started asking me about Dwarf Fortress. This is a guy who plays games like Warlock on the easiest setting then asks if there are any cheat codes.

I made a deal with him. I'd download the latest version of Dwarf Fortress and install it for him, AND, if he successfully gets a fortress up and running (we're still negotiating what this means) I will buy him any game he wants as a reward.

The idea that Dwarf Fortress (even a more modern one than the version I played) is something that he can handle, given his game-related behaviour in the past, is ludicrous.

It's not that I take glee in watching him fail, it's that I've tried to give him guidance in many areas, including meeting and conquering the challenges that games provide, instead of just side stepping them via cheat codes and I routinely fail. Now he's decided that one of the most cryptic, challenging, punishing rogue-likes I've ever experienced is something he thinks will be "fun" for him to try out because the "dudes" on the internet are talking about it.

I can literally smell the failure and frustration before it has even happened yet.

And before you lecture me on what a poor parent I am by not holding his hand through this, he's 11, has refused to accept the defeat challenges/receive reward model of gaming (i.e. he wants all reward, no challenge) on even the most basic, simple games, and rationalizes his lack of tenacity and perseverance as some sort of desire to sightsee what the game designers/makers have created instead of experiencing what the game designers/makers have made as they intended.

He treats gaming as "hey, something shiny and new" which is ok I guess, but that's not how I enjoy gaming. Combine that with me spending untold hours setting up mods and other things for him to experience for the 5 minutes his attention span allows has me annoyed with his gaming habits pretty much all the time.

It might be wrong not to be more supportive, but at least I promise not to chortle when his fledgling fortress collapses in it's second winter (if I'm being generous).

I can't think of a demographic FARTHER away from Dwarf Fortress' target demographic than my son. It would be funnier if it didn't annoy me as much as it does.

maybe you just need to restart his gameducation with arcade coin-ops - ones with no ending and inevitable failure

My kids have already "consumed" more video game content than I've seen in my life time. Sure, most of it was watching other people play it, but they still recognize it and understand where it came from, most of the time.

The hayday was when my autistic son starting asking for games for game consoles we don't have and which are no longer being manufactured and several decades older than he is. As a gaming father I *want* to make my kids happy and give them the games they want. But when one of your stipulations is that the games have to be from this century, you know things have gone off the rails.

Did I mention I hate the internet? Does anyone remember the Sears Christmas catalogue that you used to look through before Christmas to make your Santa list from? Well the internet is like that. Except it's also a time machine, and will show my kids every toy or video game ever made, ever. From any place on earth. And any time on earth. Pre-war toys from the country formerly known as Siam? Here they are. And THAT'S what they use to make their Santa lists.